Vita e Pensiero

F. PICCOLI, Achille Ardigò and «elderly condition», between sociological analysis and perspectives of social innovation. Ardigò’s contribution for the development of a full sociological knowledge about elderly condition has been very important. It has embraced several subject areas, often combining theoretical elaboration with field research and even field-testing. The aim of my paper is to provide a synthetic representation of Ardigò’s contribution, by following some guidelines: the analysis of senescence differentiation processes in relation to the broader process of social differentiation; studies and experiments on elderly home care and, more generally, I.C.T.; the exhortation of elderly to a greater civic and political engagement for the construction of our future society. Key words: elderly condition, social differentiation, senescence processes, elderly services, elderly partecipation.

G. PISI, Achille Ardigò and the Sociology of the territory. My contribution focuses on three books: Female emancipation and urbanism, The metropolitan area and The urban spread. My aim is stressing the intellectual path of Achille Ardigò, who shifted from rural Sociology to urban Sociology. Female emancipation is considered in its several elements, and all of them are connected to urbanism; in particular, the movements from rural to urban areas are mentioned. Some elements from the Ecological Chicago School and the Talcott Parsons’ theory are used as tools to deal with urbanization and urban spread trends, which were studied by Ardigò since the middle of the 1960s. Some concepts like Dominance and Planning are considered too; Ardigò used them to face the emergencies of the metropolitan area as a social system: in this case, Parsons' functional prerequisites are used as a «compass» to define such concepts, and to combine theory and empirical research. Key words: female emancipation, Talcott parson’s theories, metropolitan area, dominance, planning.

Beginning with a critical examination of F. Nietzsche’ and M. Scheler’s account of individualistic and vitalistic resentment, this paper considers the emotional patterns of resentment in everyday interactions and in social relationships characterized by inequality, in the context of modernity. Resentment is a feeling experienced by social actors when an external agency denies them opportunities or valued resources (including status) that are socially represented as available to them. Such feeling inheres simultaneously in the social structures and relationships in which social actors are embedded. Arising from social relationships, resentment depends on the wider set of relations, that constitutes the social framework in which the agent plays his part. This analytic perspective puts forward the hypothesis that resentment is always socially situated and therefore it does not arise from psychological dynamics as generally considered, but from interactive and social dynamics. In the contemporary societies, social actors have growing possibility of individual choice, but they are unable to promote the conditions of equal opportunity required in order to achieve them. An increasingly ambitious and mimetic desire clashes with a selective and competitive reality. As a consequence, a widespread and deep resentment is embedded in everyday social life. Key words: social theory, emotion, resentment, social relationship, inequality.

The concept of expectation allows multifold applications in the social theory and in the social research as well, as individual and social expectations are implicit reference concepts of social action. The article proposes to turn social expectations to better account as motivational and explanatory factors of individual and collective attitudes and behaviors, and shows the usefulness of expectations as a tool for overcoming the opposition between objective and subjective concerns in the empirical sociology. An application of expectations has been done in an empirical research about university students and their parents. The multidimensional data analysis shows that juvenile expectations come out in part from an intergenerational construction process, that the different clusters evaluate differently the achievement, and that expectations are determinant factors of motivations and social action, whilst the concept of self-esteem is being scaled down. Key words: young, expectations, motivations, self-esteem, achievement.

When analysing the concept of social relationship, the link between a person and an individual, who from a sociological perspective do not have the same semantic value, needs to be reconsidered as whole. As an individual is typically enclosed in a social dimension, it cannot have a self-referential character. Instead, it tends to half-reveal the authentic foundation of the civil society on the basis of a range of values which, after leading to the recognition of the self, activate relationships with the social other and the rest of the world including the transcendental one. In fact, within the opening relationship it’s possible to find the conscience of own existence, to purchase the awareness of own identities and to become responsible of own world of life. Considering the aspects of sociological compromise and moral quality of the afore-going, it is clear that socio-cultural exchanges – where relationship skills come clearly into play – are the heuristic foundation of the complex relationship between individuals and society. Consequently, such exchanges become social dynamics through which affective similarities and legitimate differences interact to build an ethical balance for society as well as support a differentiated development of social bonds. Key words: person, social relationship, ethics, conscience.

The article aims to contribute to the debate concerning the value and potential of using internet as a social research tool, investigating if the mere transfer of traditional survey methodological procedures to an online setting would be sufficient or, instead, it would need to be modified in order to realize a web survey. Showing the structure and main peculiarities of two online questionnaires concerning evaluation activities of an adult training course (with samples of over 15.000 learners and nearly one thousand e-tutors), the article analyses advantages and drawbacks of online methodology compared to the standard «paper-format» survey. Facing methodological issues (like sampling procedures, generalizability of the results, statistical representativeness, data and answers quality, tool personalization) the study shows some elements (objectives of research, population, target) through which the use of an online setting would lead to better results in comparison with a traditional questionnaire. Key words: web survey, internet research methods, questionnaire methodology, Computer Assisted Data Collection, data quality.

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the role of leisure studies in social change analysis and in comparative sociology studies. In the first part of the paper, we briefly review the main definitions of leisure time. Then we focus on methodological problems related to comparative analysis on leisure time use. In the second part, we compare the structure of leisure time in different european countries studying some analogies and differences among them. Eurostat data constitute the empirical basis of this comparative analysis. In the third part, we underline that counting «who does something», «how often people do something», «in which period of the day, of the week, of the month or of the year people do something» and «how much time people spend to do something» just isn’t enough for studying leisure time. Therefore, new questions should be asked: what does leisure mean in individual experiences? And how does leisure time become «institutionalized» in shared social practices? Then, an appropriate method is proposed to answer these questions. Key words: leisure time, social change, comparative analysis.

The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, it offers a wide overview of the Italian sociological research about young people condition from the 50s to the first decade of XXI Century. As a second aim, this article sketches out an analysis of social and cultural change by observing how social representations of youth transform themselves from generation to generation – Baby Boomers’ generation, X Generation and Y Generation. Last it tries to argument for the institution of a real and more specialized «sociology of youth» as a new and autonomous field of research. Key words: sociology of youth, social representations, generations, social and cultural change, life courses.